Reason, Freedom, and God
“Reason has always existed, but not always in a rational form. Hence the critic can take his cue from every existing form of theoretical and practical consciousness and from this ideal and final goal implicit in the actual forms of existing reality he can deduce a true reality.”
Marx EW Letters 1975.
I was always impressed with Marx’s critical method, as adumbrated in this passage. That method was integral to the project of rendering the real rational by way of liberating and realising its own internal premises as promises of the free and rational society. I read Marx as very much following in line of descent from Hegel, integrating the ideal vocation of freedom and reason with “actually existing premises.” That reference to an “ideal vocation” came under assault in the 1980s and 1990s, criticised as an unwarranted and unwanted metaphysics, mere relics and ruins from a bygone age.
I held fast to metaphysics, taking the view that without it, the whole project of rational freedom dissolves as a result of internal incoherence. I argued against the various ‘post’ critics, seeing them as standing in line of descent from David Hume’s absolute nihilism as well as Nietzsche. I still see that tradition as wrong, but now see the force of its criticism with respect to the emptiness of a self-legislating reason. My PhD thesis on “Marx and Rational Freedom” was concerned to draw attention to the implicit ideal running through Marx.1
Time and again in my thesis I referred to “the philosophical ideal” that is embedded in Marx’s critical vision, the idea that the abolition of philosophy that Marx called for was simultaneously its realization. The very thing that various ‘post’ thinkers sought to extirpate was the very thing I sought to accent and restore to its central place – the transcendent standards of truth and justice. That approach on my part is decidedly not the approach that Marx took. But, I would strongly argue, it is the approach that Marx needed to have taken in order to make good his normative commitments. In effect, I accepted the criticisms that various ‘post’ thinkers launched against Marx and Marxism, but went in another direction to them entirely, bringing back the ‘hidden God’ and buried metaphysics of the transcendent, for the very reason that reason and freedom cannot be sustained, let alone realized, without them.
I am steeped in Critical Theory, in the writings of Horkheimer and Adorno, Marcuse, and Fromm especially, all the way up to Jurgen Habermas. I have read Habermas in depth and have a substantial number of his books. The last chapter of my PhD thesis was on Habermas, making an eminently reasonable case for the rational society. It was my insurance policy should socialism prove too exacting in its demands for autonomy and association. My initial view of 'Rational Freedom' derived from Critical Theory. The conservatives currently blaming Critical Theory for what they call 'Woke' are completely wrong, an error which stems from political prejudice and intellectual shallowness. I read Critical Theory in an attempt to avoid the moral and intellectual degeneration of a liberalism shorn of its metaphysical supports and comprehensive commitments (the “I” liberated from constraint). As Richard Wolin wrote back in 2006, ‘While others wallow in the sophistries and cynicism of postmodernism, Habermas has remained an unwavering champion of democratic precepts and the "moral point of view."’ Me too. What is needed is a philosophy that is capable of encompassing two ends, defending the moral legitimacy of democratic norms whilst also respecting the realities of cultural difference. Habermas’ communication ethic struck me as capable of satisfying both these requirements to give us both autonomy and solidarity. It knows how to reconcile universal morality with cultural pluralism. Might the twenty-first century, then, be Habermasian? ‘Only if we are lucky,’ answers Wolin.2 Judging by the evidence so far, we are bang out of luck. The century is going in an entirely different direction, and not a good one.
What seems to have happened is that the world has discovered that the noble vision of a self-authored free society is impossible, since reason cannot be its own foundation. The attempt to be self-determining and free grace of a self-legislating reason could not but flounder, as the likes of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche saw long ago. A self-authored Rational Freedom, in the manner of Habermas’ communication community, fractured, Kant’s notion of intersubjectivity gave way to subjectivism (or emotivism and expressivism). Conservatives, swayed by a virulent anti-socialism, rush to blame Marx and Marxism, but this is shallow. Such conservatives are not conservatives at all, or only partly so, but right liberals or economic liberals. It is that right liberalism which is implicated in the rise of left liberalism, or ‘woke’ or postmodernism (whatever name you want to give it).
I would pay close attention to this passage from Max Horkheimer’s The Eclipse of Reason:
“It is true that although the progress of subjective reason destroyed the theoretical basis of mythological, religious, and rationalistic ideas, civilized society has up until now been living on the residue of these ideas. But they tend to become more than ever a mere residue and are thus gradually losing their power of conviction. When the great religious and philosophical conceptions were alive, thinking people did not extol humility and brotherly love, justice and humanity because it was realistic to maintain such principles and odd and dangerous to deviate from them, or because these maxims were more in harmony with their supposedly free tastes than others. They held to such ideas because they saw in them elements of truth, because they connected them with the idea of logos, whether in the form of God or of a transcendental mind, or even of nature as an eternal principle. Not only were the highest aims thought of as having an objective meaning, an inherent significance, but even the humblest pursuits and fancies depended on a belief in the general desirability, the inherent value of their objects. [...]
These old forms of life smoldering under the surface of modern civilization still provide, in many cases, the warmth inherent in any delight, in any love of a thing for its own sake rather than for that of another thing. The pleasure of keeping a garden goes back to ancient times when gardens belonged to the gods and were cultivated for them. The sense of beauty in both nature and art is connected, by a thousand delicate threads, to these old superstitions. If, by either flouting or flaunting the threads, modern man cuts them, the pleasure may continue for a while but its inner life is extinguished.
We cannot credit our enjoyment of a flower or of the atmosphere of a room to an autonomous esthetic instinct. Man's esthetic responsiveness relates in its prehistory to various forms of idolatry; his belief in the goodness or sacredness of a thing precedes his enjoyment of its beauty. This applies no less to such concepts as freedom and humanity. What has been said about the dignity of man is certainly applicable to the concepts of justice and equality. Such ideas must preserve the negative element, as the negation of the ancient stage of injustice or inequality, and at the same time conserve the original absolute significance rooted in their dreadful origins. Otherwise they become not only indifferent but untrue.
— Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (1947), I, p. 34–36
The rational freedom I argued for in my thesis was, in line with Marx, an attempt to have my transcendent cake and eat it too. It can’t be done: once it is gone, it is gone for good, leaving only myriad projections and perspectives as power plays, each creating, asserting, and attempting to impose ‘their good’ – and ‘their truth’ – on others. If the “philosophical ideal” exists at all, then it has to exist for all time, always remaining independent of the practices and institutions of time and place even though it can only be incarnated socially and historically in time and place. The ‘post’ critics were right to note the internal incoherence of the ‘rational’ position, but wrong in thinking that their nihilism would be liberatory. The very opposite.
Which isn’t to say that the solution is to return to a self-legislating reason in the Kantian, Hegelian, and Marxian tradition. As I read deeply in this tradition, I was always aware of a ‘hidden God,’ a certain ‘flavour’ interwoven into the rational fabric. Postmodernist critics noticed it too and sought its extirpation. The result has been a metaphysical hecatomb, an orgy of anti-metaphysical violence which has involved the destruction of collective and collectivising symbols and substitutes for god. The last in line is ‘Man,’ that humanity that is the true image of the God that the age despises, denies, and destroys. Marx? Marx was in on the slaughter, but his demand to end God, as the illusory Sun, entailed a demand that a self-conscious humanity revolve around its own Sun.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his olast wn true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.3
It was a noble vision of a rational freedom, and one to which I fully subscribed for many years. But it was impossible from the first. The universality that that vision requires couldn’t be sustained without the centralising, cohering force of God, with reason coming to fracture into the myriad reasons of myriad self-choosing gods. That’s not Marx and rational freedom but their defeat. (I examine the issue in depth in A Home and a Resting Place Homo Religiosus: The Reality of Religious Truth and Experience (2018)4
So where does that leave us? It leaves us with the nominalist inanities and insanities of the ‘post’ crowd, the identitarians, the ‘woke.’ Here I have to disabuse certain conservatives of their simplicities, by which I mean those conservatives who persist in identifying ‘the Left’ as such and Marxism and socialism in particular as responsible for the malaise in the contemporary West. That view is blinkered by its political commitments and loyalties and will do nothing to arrest, let alone reverse, the malaise, and will more than likely do plenty to accelerate it. ‘Woke’ is not the problem but is a mere symptom of a much deeper malaise in meaning, belonging, and identity. Communities, traditions, and cultures are not in the process of being broken, they already were. People are crying out for meaning and belonging but have lost connection with cohering principles and connection to others. 5
The blunt truth is that it is right liberalism which has led to left liberalism, in ways that are destructive of Marxism, socialism, and rational freedom. An anti-woke conservatism that is really liberalism at base is not only not enough to arrest the descent down the rabbit whole of anti-reality, it is complicit in creating the material and cultural conditions that brought us to the 2020s, the broken communities and fractured meanings. What people, wedded to the old political categories, persist in seeing as a conservative right versus a socialist left is really an economic liberalism working in tandem with a cultural liberalism.6 The dead giveaway here is the extent to which both of these liberal wings have abandoned the working class, treating the working class merely as so much human fodder to be organised and ordered from an Empyrean nowhere land by way of a remote control that operates through markets and media, both set firmly within the corporate form.
Right liberalism leads to left liberalism. As Jameson, Eagleton, Harvey, Geras and other Marxists – myself included - argued in the 1980s and 1990s, postmodernism is ‘the cultural logic of late capitalism.’ Frederic Jameson published Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism in 1984, the year I first went to university. I agreed with Jameson, but saw ‘Postmodernism’ sweep through university departments from the late 1980s onwards. And ‘woke,’ I would argue, is its idiot bastard child. Being entirely fair to various ‘post’ thinkers, they were far from stupid, and had the merit of calling out the moral and intellectual emptiness of modernity and modern philosophy and moral theory. That’s my point, and it is a key point. Many who are trying to fight back are basically modernists, rationalists, and liberal humanists and progressives who have yet to realize the emptiness of their Reason. Postmodernism is modernism without the innocence and naivety, a modernism revealed to be without foundation – you cannot put science, technology, or reason or some other abstraction and idol where God once was, God was never an existent power in that sense. Postmodernists revealed what was always the case – there are no such foundations – and people screamed that ‘anything goes’ in today’s chaotic world. It is more profitable to go back a few stages and examine the nature of the God that the moderns had thought to supplant.
The nihilism that some of the liveliest thinkers have espoused stands revealed as just another counterfeit theology, the latest in a long line of failed ‘gods’ – culture, Nature, Reason, ‘humanity,’ science, technology. Humans seem determined to keep going from one to the other over and again, running round and round in perpetuity, anything to avoid recognising a truth that is staring the age of scientism and culturalism in its uncomprehending face. That ‘flavour’ I detected running through the ‘rational freedom’ I argued for, that metaphysics and ‘hidden God’ that rational thinkers buried out of a combination of shame, denial, and intellectual arrogance, and which postmodernist thinkers sought to expose and extirpate, is actually the enduring, sustaining, nourishing strength of reason and freedom. Past cultures have traditionally called that vital force ‘God.’ As Victor Frankl wrote in Man's Search for Meaning:
In the last resort, man should not ask, 'What is the meaning of my life?' but should realise that he himself is being questioned. Life is putting its problems to him, and it is up to him to respond to these questions by being responsible; he can only answer to life by answering for his life. Life is a task. The religious man differs from the apparently irreligious man only by experiencing his existence not simply as a task, but as a mission. This means that he is also aware of the taskmaster, the source of his mission. For thousands of years that source has been called God.7
In my PhD thesis I discussed the work of Max Weber to highlight the potential for ersatz and surrogate gods and collective symbols, with the liberatory potential of reason being supplanted by a repressive rationalization, involving the endless war of rival rationalizations, Weber’s polytheism of renascent gods. I argued for the recovery of substantive conception of the good, showing what social relations and practices were required to establish the common ground facilitating the common good. That was in 2001. Since then, I have seen society continue to fragment and fracture as a result of its increasingly untrammelled secularising forces continuing to rationalize the ever-increasing distance from the moral principles and rational norms that secular humanism claimed a self-legislating reason could sustain. As a result, I came to qualify the claims I had made for the powers of human reason in a moral praxis by way of strengthening the overarching and authoritative framework of transcendent standards. A secular humanism based on self-created values has no moral bottom. Self-created standards are no standard at all. To what do we refer in the act of creation by way of a guide or a principle or an ideal to be actualised? How is the rational to be made real if we have no sense of what that reason entails? Without core absolutes of right and wrong, anything can be rationalized as good or bad, according to personal whim or preference. Without some transcendent origin, those absolutes cannot be true absolutes, merely projections of particular preferences and perspectives, with an attempt to extend them over others.
I continue to admire those great secular humanist thinkers, the philosophers and scientists who are located in the Enlightenment tradition. I made a strong case for the Rational Society on the basis of their work. Kant went to the greatest lengths to put the moral truths of the Gospel on a rational basis. But his reason couldn’t bear the moral weight he placed on it. As for those who take their stand on science, consider the dwindling numbers of Bertrand Russells, and consider further how powerless and irrelevant (and often misguided) the Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinkers are. The cheery notions of a linear progress at the heart of liberal humanism seem twee and naïve in light of so many of the rationalizers now openly advocating forms of totalitarianism, even and especially in the name of truth. God is back, but it is not the true God, and is merciless and unforgiving. This is not God but Moloch. A secularizing liberal humanism rests on sand. The rational architectonic doesn’t just sink into its soft terrain, it is blown in all directions. Things can only be held together and unity ensured only by force, the force of some imposed on all others.
As for the errors and illusions of religion, these are less important than establishing possibilities for their correction. Of course, the imposition of a unitarian truth removed from scrutiny and criticism has been one of the greatest errors of past religion. But religion is not alone in attempting to impose and maintain a false and empty universalism. With possibilities for self-correction and self-cleansing in place, with an emphasis on humility in recognition of human fallibility, it should be possible to recover the core insights shared by the great religions. It is my view that religion is indispensable to a moral order and a healthy and vibrant civilization. Leszek Kolakowski writes:
The absence of God, when consistently upheld and thoroughly examined, spells the ruin of man in the sense that it demolishes or robs of meaning everything we have been used to think of as the essence of being human: the quest for truth, the distinction of good and evil, the claim to dignity, the claim to creating something that withstands the indifferent destructiveness of time.8
Will and Ariel Durant concur:
There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.9
The people who persist in identifying religion with error, superstition, and repression, asserting the liberatory power of reason and science, need to understand that this world is their world, that the mounting problems we face are self-authored, and that they need to explain why we are a long way away from the Earthly Paradise promised by purely human reason. In fine, they need to own the crises of the modern rationalized world, or be made to own them.
If you don’t have true religion at the centre of your society, then you won’t have no religion, merely bad religion, no matter how much it may be called reason, culture, and science, or some variant of those things. Human beings always tend to think God on their side, not least when they are the creators of said god.
Rebecca Goldstein writes of the “sad sight of human life untouched by transcendence.”10
My undergraduate philosophy classes studied a select number of philosophers, just five or six. One of them was Giambattista Vico. We studied the verum ipsum factum principle, the idea that the condition of knowing something is to have made it. It was this insight that set me on the path of a ‘rational freedom’ to be attained by an autonomous and unaided human reason. That, indeed, was the theme of the course. Naturally, then, we went on to study Hegel and Marx. There was some dismissive comment on the extent to which Hegel’s Geist implied God. The lecturer made it clear that such spirit was really human reason as it unfolded in history. That view lent itself well to the next philosopher to be studied, Karl Marx and his view of history as human self-creation. With respect to Vico, there was a great deal made of Vico’s reference to nature as unknowable in being the realm of God. In being a human creation, human society and all its created contents could be known by reason. Again, there was a dismissive comment on religion, to the effect that Vico conceded nature to God for the simple reason that he had to in order to appease the Inquisition. I accepted this at the time, and so was led on my merry way to a rational freedom which was the product of an enlightened and creative human agency. I’m not going to repudiate that view, having argued for it for so long. I think it is a noble vision. But it requires serious qualification. To the extent that human beings go it alone, they risk becoming orphans of their own creations, cut off from the transcendent source and end of all things, and the masters of nowhere. In the years after I left university I came read Vico in the raw. I found him to be far more of a religious thinker than I was taught (I also learned that nature was not rendered an unknowable realm on account of being God’s creation. To the contrary, God made the world intelligible to creatures endowed with intelligence, which is to say human beings made in likeness to God). Vico writes:
If people lose their religion, nothing remains to keep them living in a society. They have no shield for their defence, no basis for their decisions, no foundation for their stability, and no form by which they exist in the world.11
The solution is to understand God as both immanent and transcendent, and to understand that any attempt to find transcendent purpose, meaning, and end within an ethics of immanence is doomed to failure and frustration (with who knows what destructiveness in the process).12
Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.13
The question boils down to the idea of whether the only obligations we have are the ones we have consciously assumed or whether we owe something to a reality or a moral good that that is independent of our choosing. The notion of a deeper freedom that issues from acknowledging the putative obligations one has to a good that is greater than our subjective likes, wants, and desires cuts against the grain of the choice-led values of the modern liberal landscape. Indeed, the contemporary moral terrain barely counts as moral at all given the open repudiation of notions of an objective moral truth and reality that is binding on the individual. The good has been reduced to a matter of personal choice and taste, mere likes and dislikes that pay zero attention to substantive worth and quality. Ethics in the modern moral landscape is governed by the idea of individual choice and preference, with morality considered to be no more than irreducible subjective opinion. There is a moral marketplace in exactly the same way as there is an economic marketplace, and the individual is the deified ‘I’ who is ‘free to choose’ (to use the phrase employed by free market economist Milton Friedman). Inevitably, economics spills over into culture.
But, some might contend, that notion of the individual being free to choose is liberatory, surely? That notion is to be celebrated for striking a blow for individual freedom against overweening authorities and interfering bureaucracies, surely? There is indeed a good deal of truth in these objections. ‘Free to choose’ started life as a praiseworthy cry of individual freedom against exploitative and parasitic authorities of all kinds, and still serves as such in an age of would-be universal managers and top down reformers-regulators. Beware at all times the bureaucrats of knowledge and power! Those who would sacrifice freedom for the ‘greater good’ need to understand that freedom is not merely a condition of the greater good but an essential and integral dimension of it. I am all in favour of the individual cry of freedom.14
The problem is that the individual liberators and authoritarian repressors are two sides of the same coin. Individualism and collectivism are two sides of the same liberal ontology that falsely separates two essential aspects of human nature, individuality and sociality. Both sides are equally abstract and false in losing sight of a substantive good and objective reality that is greater than their specific personal and corporate interests, reality that comes with a substantive morality that binds, obligates, and orients choice, both personal and institutional. The sense of a moral order that exists beyond choices, stakes, interests, and power plays has been lost. It is important in this respect to understand precisely what Nietzsche meant when he referred to the “death of God.”15
This phrase referred to the loss of an overarching and authoritative moral framework based on a belief in God. For Nietzsche, there was no such thing as a substantive good, an objective moral order. Those of a scientific persuasion, holding no truck for religion, cheered, and kept on cheering for a century and more as society plunged into the moral morass. We live ‘after virtue.’ This was both complacent and ignorant. Many of these who cheered are now in despair at our ‘post-truth’ society. Where have they been? Nihilism has been at the door a long while. It has now been let in. Nietzsche’s repudiation of notions of objectivity and rationality as mere projections of power embraced science as much as religion. It’s a package deal. Weber sought to hold on to the rationality of science whilst accepting the subjectivism of moral value. That approach breaks down as a result of internal coherence. It is no step at all from holding that each individual is free to choose his or her own good as they see fit to the idea that each is entitled to choose their own truth in like manner. Here we are, in the ‘post-truth’ age of ‘my truth.’ (Let me state categorically that we can never be ‘post-truth,’ whatever the stupidities of passing culture and convention). We live in an age of a passive amoralism in which individuals pay scant regard to notions of objective reality and absolute truth to indulge their likes and dislikes without interference and censor. From being a cry aimed against overweening elites and authorities, the assertion of individual freedom has degenerated into the delusion that reality could be bent in accordance with the will of subjective choice. ‘Become what you are!’ said Nietzsche, a notion that would seem to imply some innate potential to be actualised. Now the cry is choose what you are! Notions of essential givenness and potentiality are deemed repressive of the otherness of ones choosing. Depending on one’s perspective, anti-essentialism is the vice or the virtue of the age.16
Metaphysically, the age is characterised by an anti-realism and an anti-foundationalism which entails that there are no innate potentials and lines of development that human beings are obliged to actualise as a condition of flourishing (happiness as Eudaimonia). It also mean that there are no objective givens that cannot be overcome by – and, importantly, should not be allowed to stand in the way of – subjective human will. Like the good, truth is now equipped with a possessive pronoun, thereby rendering the true and the good submissive to individual will and choice: my good, my truth. Beauty goes the same way. The phrase ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ is familiar by way of repetition, a repetition which makes clear the extent of its acceptance. The notion is uncontroversial, making it clear that there is no way of deciding over matters of taste. But what if I was to say that truth and goodness are now going the same way? And that ethics went that way a long, long time ago? It seems to be commonly accepted that morality is merely a series of value judgements, without any objective standards and criteria to settle ethical disputes. If this is so, then moral goods could just as easily be considered moral bads, since there can be no way of differentiating one from the other. That is the end of morality. There is no substantive good by which to refer moral choice to. The only thing that matters is the choosing. Where does value lie?
The meaning of the phrase ‘beauty is in the eyes of the beholder’ seems clear – beauty is a subjective state, a matter of individual taste and preference. This most certainly is a paraphrase which not only alters but actually inverts the meaning of the original phrase. The origin of the phrase is almost certainly Plato’s Symposium.
‘The contemplation of beauty absolute; a beauty which if you once beheld, you would see not to be after the measure of gold.’
‘But what if man had eyes to see the true beauty—the divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the colors and vanities of human life—thither looking, and holding converse with the true beauty simple and divine? Remember how in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may.
Plato Symposium
The idea of a ‘true’ ‘divine’ beauty which is beheld with ‘the eye of the mind’ is a very different notion to that of beauty being in the eye of the beholder. Beholding beauty with the ‘eye of the mind’ – the intellect rather than the senses – brings forth ‘not images of beauty, but realities, for he has hold not of an image but of a reality’. Plato therefore argues for beauty as an objective reality which the ‘eye of the mind’ must apprehend as a beautiful reality rather than as image.
Where does value lie? In the opinion of the valuer or in the thing that is valued? The modern answer to that age-old question is clear: value lies in the chooser and the choosing. There is no substantive moral order, merely a particular moral context in which the individual chooser points to something and says: “I like it” “I want it” (or, negatively, “I dislike it” “I don’t want it.” This is not ethics, merely an emotivism or expressivism which revolves around likes and dislikes, subjective choices in the manner of market preferences. The paradigmatic context for moral consideration has shifted from kneeling in church pew to casting our gaze on the available wares in the supermarket. The nearest such people get to a moral judgement is the lament that there is nothing to choose, ‘they are all the same’ (the passive consumer’s lament at the state of politics …)
I’m interested in the role of economics in all of this, for the very reason that conservatives who have the tendency to lament this moral degeneration the most tend also to have a blindspot when it comes to causality and culpability. Predictably ‘Leftism’ in general and Marxism in particular are in the dock. To which I ask: Which Marx? Which Marxism? To run Marxism together with ‘postmodernism’ is loose in the extreme (and that’s before we even come to trying to parse what postmodernism is). I’ve spent a quarter of a century making the fine distinctions here and refer readers to my work elsewhere. In this essay, I am more interested in showing that ‘postmodernism’ or ‘cultural Leftism’ is the very antithesis of Marxism and socialism in being anti-realist, anti-foundationalist, and anti-working class. That cultural Leftism has its origins elsewhere, and it is here that the work of excavation (as against political apologetics) must begin.
The character traits and modes of evaluation nurtured by a capitalistic market society has played an enormous role in fostering the subjectivist mentality. Materially, the capital system has lifted billions globally out of poverty, at the same time freeing oppressed individuals from the restrictions of traditional societies and the moral obligations associated with them. This is the positive aspect of the great disembedding which cut ‘free individuals’ from tradition, community, the state, religion, nature, the society of others … from every identity and belonging that human beings as meaning seeking social creatures need in order to “become what they are.” Capitalism has served as a universal acid dissolving the weight of social and historical being. This is where the cultural erasure of history and being originates. Which is precisely why some of us do not cheer so loudly whenever it is claimed that human beings are healthier, wealthier, better educated, and longer-lived than ever before in history, and in greater numbers. That huge material achievement has been bought at a moral and anthropological cost, and it isn’t clear how the balance is to be settled without losing some real gains.
(I examine the issue at length in The Quest for Belonging, Meaning, and Morality: Morality and Modernity (2020)17
In the interregnum, money is morality, monetary values the only true values. The money you have in your pocket or bank account determines the extent to which a person has to abide by the values of another. The wealthier you are, the freer you are, a point which applies to the cultural Left no matter the protest against oppression.
With so many conservatives still in thrall to an economic neoliberalism that has been instrumental in unravelling the moral, social, and natural ecology, it is left to Karl Marx to state the conservative case with customary force and vigour:
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.18
My advice to conservatives here is to lay off the socialist Left, the revolution that is in the process of eating itself, and the social and natural world to boot, is bourgeois to the core. Conservatives need to examine their own culpability here with respect to their support for economic neoliberalism and the new idols of the capital system.
What we have here is not a genuine ethics but a subjectivism in which the true, the good, and the beautiful are all in the estimation of the individual chooser. This is an ethical narcissism, the last stop to solipsism and a world of pure power beyond exchange and communication. It is the very antithesis of the communication community that formed Jurgen Habermas’ ideal of the Rational Society.
From the standpoint of what is condescendingly called ‘traditional morality,’ members of a society are born into a network of relations within which they are obligated by notions of “duty” and “service” to those with whom they are connected. At the heart of this morality is the view that the individual’s life is not all about him or her but about the relations they have to others. This is the direct antithesis of the view which holds the good, and now even the true, as being about choosing or asserting the will or my having chosen something. There is no discrete individual in the ‘traditional’ view, no abstract individual prior to and holding claims against society. I say ‘traditional’ here in an attempt to appeal to conservatives and ween them away from economic neoliberalism (or classical liberalism). The view is also central to the socialism I modelled on a conception of Rational Freedom.
Instructive here is Jurgen Habermas’ conception of the good society as a society of rational freedom constituted on the basis of a communicative ethic. The liberal view of the good society sees public life as a neutral system of freely developed conceptions of the good on the part of individuals. This involves a minimal state which upholds a negative conception of liberty, holding the ring between competing views and maintaining the civil peace. Habermas praises the ‘honourable history’ of these ideas, and argues for a retention of some elements of the liberal tradition. In particular, he argues for a degree of legal equality which will allow at the same time ‘the greatest possible measure of individualism, and this means space for individuals to shape their own lives.’ He does, however, note the cogency of the criticisms of individualistic conceptions which have been brought forward since Hegel:
Freedom, even personal freedom, freedom of choice in the last instance, can only be thought in internal connection with a network of interpersonal relationships, and this means in the context of the communicative structures of a community, which ensures that the freedom of some is not achieved at the cost of the freedom of others. Interestingly, abstract right is not sufficient for this purpose. One must make the effort to analyse the conditions of collective freedom, which remove the dangers of individual freedom, its potential for social-Darwinistic menace.
The individual cannot be free unless all are free, and all cannot be free unless all are free in community. It is this last proposition which one misses in the empiricist and individualist traditions.19
Habermas thus makes clear the extent to which even personal happiness involves maintaining right relations to others. He analyses the conditions of this collective freedom in terms of the communicative community of rational citizens, thus defining the principle of rational freedom as a social freedom. Advancing the ideal of a community constituted by a domination-free communicative rationality, Habermas posits reasonable speech as the organising principle of socialised humanity that has learned to live well together.
This is an expansive view of freedom as something that is interpersonal, positive sum rather than zero sum. A person lives in service to something greater than they are.
I write more on sacrifice and service to others in Freedom Through Service20, inspired by the image of that peculiar kind of king who divested himself of power and “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” (Philippians 2).
Compare this notion of freedom to that of Ayn Rand, a woman who is lauded by supposed conservatives, yet who denounced religion as an “affront to reason” and asserted the deified “I” as the arbiter of all value.21
Rand’s freedom is the freedom of the discrete individual opposed to all others and to society. She asserts the freedom of the chooser to choose as he or she sees fit: “No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation on another man,” Ayn Rand, in The Virtue of Selfishness. It should go without saying that this is not conservatism, although many conservatives, blinded by a virulent anti-socialism, laud and praise it to the Heavens that Rand scorns. There is no God for Rand but the “I” alone; there is no society of I-Thou relations for Rand, only the deified “I.”
The Leftism that is supposedly sweeping the world is the cultural counterpart of the economic neoliberalism inspired by the likes of Rand, Hayek, Friedman, and Von Mises (I should add that, intellectually, Hayek and Von Mises are a cut above the ideologues and are to be engaged rather than dismissed).
To repeat, right liberalism has spawned the left liberalism that has swept the old Social Left away and replaced it with the Cultural Left. The people who make, move, build, and grow things, the working class once considered the bedrock of socialism, is now discarded and despised, replaced by other ‘revolutionary agents’ of intellectuals’ and academics’ choice. In my PhD research notes, published on Academia, I warned of the deleterious political effects of the ‘academicisation of Marxism.’ That academicisation amounts to a radical desolidarisation and desocialisation fragmenting the socialist movement from within.22
Conservatives persist in blaming ‘the Left’ for the dissolution of moral and social unity. The truth is that the Left, the old socialist Left, has itself been dissolved by the forces unleashed by neoliberalism, a neoliberalism which many erstwhile conservatives supported in its economic form. They’ve been had – privatisation and liberalisation of the market has ushered in globalisation of economic relations and culture and the corporatisation of public and private life. Conservatism and socialism both have fallen to neoliberalism. The current war being fought by Left and Right is really a phony war conducted by the twin forces of economic and cultural neoliberalism.
I hate to keep saying this (it is neither helpful nor enlightening nor inspiring … ) but I did warn of this back in the 1990s.23
As for ‘the Left,’ I would suggest that conservatives stop looking to blame Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Marx (as well as Gramsci, Lukacs, Critical Theory, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, and ‘postmodernism,’ myriad distinctive intellectual strains all lumped together as one, and look closer to home – the real intellectual roots of the modern malaise lie in Hobbes’ assertion of power and competition within a godless, purposeless materialism, David Hume’s absolute nihilism, and Locke’s tabula rasa, all of which has led to this world of endless empty cycles of creation and recreation. I write at length on this in the essays Transcending the Existential Self-Hatred that Consumes the World 24 and Transcendent Standards or a world of pure contingency and arbitrariness 25 as well as in a number of books. 26
I shall end on a note of optimism. Since publication in 2013, my book on St Thomas Aquinas, Aquinas, Morality, and Modernity, has never been outside of the Top 5% ranking on Academia and is currently riding high in the Top 2%. People are searching for a way out, and that way does exist.27
References
Unless stated otherwise, all references refer to written work by me
1. Critical Studies in Rational Freedom (2001)
2. Richard Wolin, Frankfurt School Revisited 2006
3. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction 1843
https://www.academia.edu/39267980/A_Home_and_a_Resting_Place_Homo_Religiosus_The_Reality_of_Religious_Truth_and_Experience
Rootless Fruitless
7. Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1984, p. 13
8. Leszek Kolakowski, Religion, London, Fontana, 1982, p. 215
9. Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1996, p. 51
10. Rebecca Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, New York, Pantheon, 2010, p. 308.
11. Giambattista Vico, New Science: Principles of the New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations, trans. David Marsh, London, Penguin Classics, 1999, p. 490.
13. Max Planck, Where Is Science Going? With a Preface by Albert Einstein, trans. J. Murphy, London, Allen and Unwin, 1933, p. 217.
18. Marx and Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party Rev1848 (Penguin) 1973, pp.70-71
19. Jürgen Habermas Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Habermas 1992: 146
The Ecology of Good (2020)
27. Aquinas, Morality and Modernity. The Search for the Natural Moral Law and the Common Good (2013)
https://www.academia.edu/4472142/Aquinas_Morality_and_Modernity_The_Search_for_the_Natural_Moral_Law_and_the_Common_Good
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